[Priest] State of Discipline - 4.0.3

[Kelesti]

This is a continuation of this thread.

So what changed for Discipline in 4.0.3?

Atonement is still nothing more than "fun" talents for 5-mans, with unreliability nbeing a huge factor. Archangel costing more mana than it's worth helps to seal the deal.

Grace being buffed helps solidify the superiority of "Heal" as a filler spell.

Prayer of Healing had its mana cost reduced, and its output increased...
...But Divine Aegis now triggers off each Prayer hit, whether crit or not.

Rapture was brought down, to help mana matter again (and further discourage "shield spamming" behavior).

Power Word: Barrier now actually has a duration, and feels like an awesome button worth pushing now.

PvE wise, these last changes have made some great distance in normalizing healers, without making them identical (capabilities do not equate to homogenization). Smite's terrible still, but whatever.

PvP wise, Discipline still suffers from removal of Dispel Resistance, which makes them vulnerable from their inability to "tank" damage once their cooldowns expire. Mobility may or may not fix this, but it would certainly be an improvement.

In Arena, I expect Discipline to suffer for the first season. In Battlegrounds, Barrier, Pain Suppression, and Power Infusion will benefit them, but that's only if your team can keep things off of you already.

At least, that's my take.

What's yours?

[Aliahna]

I'm not quite ready to write off Evangelism/Archangel/Atonement yet. If however, Blizzard never allows Grace to affect the Atonement heal then yes, I think they have made those 5 point worthless for anything other than leveling and 5 man dungeons. I still think Archangel + PI popped together could be a very powerful method for a disc priest to pump out some heavy duty raid healing via PoH but again, what sounds good in theory doesn't always play out. I hope Blizzard continues to monitor those 5 talent points and their use because I'm not seeing any beta testing raiding disc priests (25 man raiding) using Atonement at all.

I'm extremely happy with the recent Beta changes to the disc priest. I hope we will never see the return of the PW:S spamming disc priest. I also hope they find a way to put a debuff on the raid associated with PW: Barrier (Weakened Heart or something LOL) that prohibits the stacking of disc priests just to exploit Barrier.

[Kelesti]

I also hope they find a way to put a debuff on the raid associated with PW: Barrier (Weakened Heart or something LOL) that prohibits the stacking of disc priests just to exploit Barrier.

Then you would need a debuff from Tranquility and Divine Hymn. From Guardian Spirit, Hand of Sacrifice, Pain Suppression.

It's a 10 second uptime on a 3 minute cooldown, and it's 30% so while it's stronger than Divine Guardian, it's also location-dependent (can you really group up and stay there?).

There doesn't need to be a debuff associated with it, and doing so would only call for shared cooldowns or debuffs between classes (Guardian Spirit vs Pain Suppression for example)

[Suzaku]

This is a continuation of this thread.

So what changed for Discipline in 4.0.3?

Atonement is still nothing more than "fun" talents for 5-mans, with unreliability being a huge factor. Archangel costing more mana than it's worth helps to seal the deal.

Grace being buffed helps solidify the superiority of "Heal" as a filler spell.

I believe that they need to change Archangel and Evangelism into something that will actually be useful for Discipline Priests and Holy Priests. Evangelism should be gained from Penance ticks (healing and damage) and Smite. Instead of increasing the damage and reducing the mana cost of Smite and Penance, Evangelism should increase all absorbs by 10% and reduce all instant casts by 5% and Archangel should either be a 45 second cooldown that restores 15% total mana while increasing all healing by 15% for 18 seconds. With this change, Discipline Priests would maintain Evangelism to have higher throughput for Divine Aegis and PW: Shield, while forcing the Priest to use another spell to maintain the buff and popping Archangel during periods of high AoE damage for Prayer of Healing.

Power Word: Barrier now actually has a duration, and feels like an awesome button worth pushing now.

With this change, I feel that Pain Suppression should also have its cooldown reduced as well. If an AoE 30% damage reduction for 10 seconds is only 2 minute cooldown, then I feel that Pain Suppression, which is a 40% damage reduction for a single target should also be a 2 minute cooldown.

PvP wise, Discipline still suffers from removal of Dispel Resistance, which makes them vulnerable from their inability to "tank" damage once their cooldowns expire. Mobility may or may not fix this, but it would certainly be an improvement.

In Arena, I expect Discipline to suffer for the first season. In Battlegrounds, Barrier, Pain Suppression, and Power Infusion will benefit them, but that's only if your team can keep things off of you already.

At least, that's my take.

What's yours?

PvP-wise Discipline Priests need Divine Aegis to not be based on crit modifiers. PvP Discipline Priest should all agree that the first two seasons of arena gear does not provide nearly enough crit value for Divine Aegis to be worth the 3 talent point investment. Haste will become even more highly valued in PvP in both Arena and Rated BGs as Blizzard is forcing healers to use their 2.5 second casts. Since Discipline Priests cannot cast while moving and their form of instant heal (PW: Shield and Prayer of Mending) can be easily dispelled, Haste will become the stat to stack for interrupt protection as well as mana efficiency since you will actually be able to cast Heal as a base heal with reduced cast time. Discipline Priests suffer greatly from the lack of "junk" buffs and the lack of Dispel protection and even more so than Restoration Druids did before Lifebloom. At least when Rejuvenation was removed, Restoration Druids could reapply the HoT, however Discipline Priests are still stuck with the Weakened Soul debuff.

Discipline Priests still have a long way to go before being balanced for PvP, and I think Discipline Priests still need a few minor buffs for PvE to be competitive to Druids and Paladins.

[Aliahna]

Then you would need a debuff from Tranquility and Divine Hymn. From Guardian Spirit, Hand of Sacrifice, Pain Suppression.

It's a 10 second uptime on a 3 minute cooldown, and it's 30% so while it's stronger than Divine Guardian, it's also location-dependent (can you really group up and stay there?).

There doesn't need to be a debuff associated with it, and doing so would only call for shared cooldowns or debuffs between classes (Guardian Spirit vs Pain Suppression for example)

Isn't the cooldown for Barrier 2 minutes on Beta? I know it is 3 minutes on live, but I thought the corrected tooltip was 2 mins for the spell? I agree that Barrier is balanced in comparison to Divine Guardian due to the location, and diameter of the bubble. Since DG is brought by a prot paladin only you won't see abuse of DG by paladins.

Maybe Barrier abuse won't happen but I can see some guilds, in order to trivialize encounters. stacking disc priests to exploit PW: Barrier. Ultimately that could cause the ability to be nerfed, and I really don't want to see that happen.

[Kelesti]

Sorry, still thinking back on old data. Working from faulty memory while usin a terrible phone browser at work is not the recommended method to Mod.

But for stacking Discipline Priests, you're giving up Innervates, Mana Tide + Ankh, Aura Mastery, and any area-based healing.

There might be one encounter where you could abuse it (lolInfest) but it really won't play out that well in the general scheme of things.

[Aliahna]

I've raided long enough to know that if there is a way to trivialize boss mechanics some guilds will find ways to do it...regardless of whether it is ideal or not, or whether their actions have adverse affects afterwards. I hope it doesn't happen because personally I don't think PW: Barrier is overpowered. If however, guilds can chain Barrier > Barrier > Divine Guardian > Divine Guardian > Barrier > Barrier, to trivialize mechanics then it could be a problem for balance.

Hopefully it will turn out to be a non-issue, but the potential for abuse is there unfortunately.

[avestren]

I don't really see it trivializing encounters. People are assuming it works like the paladin spell.

First and foremost, PW: B is a targetted AOE spell. All the raid members must coordinate to get the effect. This requires raid coordination and not just timing. Furthermore, this won't be the answer to all raidwide damage bursts. Blizzard often punishes the collapsing (or grouping) up of raids. It's just not how all raid encounters work. This is probably the most balanced a AOE damage reduction could ever take, in my honest opinion.

[PlatedPriest]

i think evanglism, archangel, attonment will not be good in the first teir of raiding.........but who knows it could see some major changes in 4.1 and make a come back! i sure hope so cause it was really fun to play with.

also off topic:
what do u guys think of my new avatar?

[Kelesti]

Eh, people will, but you could say people will abuse Shaman when their Reincarnate doesn't trigger the Soulstone or Rebirth cooldown. But a debuff would cause more problems than it would solve, and you're back with the "no point in bringing a second Discipline Priest ever" mantra.

And even with raidstacking simply for the sake of Barrier, you're giving up a lot of healer utility, synergy, and bonus area healing and tank support, when the raid's still taking 70% damage.

Cutting it down may be easier to handle, but being ill equipped for an encounter, you'll still fall behind, no matter how you stack the cooldowns.

[avestren]

After reading Alianha's post, the first thing I thought of was "Withdrawn Soul." I'm entertained by these possible rip offs of Weakened Soul.

[xhuntard88]

I like most changes , except my Bubble seems to last too short, maybe somthing is off with scaling or w/e I hope it gets better come the patch, or when we hit lvl 80, if not well them im getting use to it

[ramennoodleking]

For me, Atonement is working as it did last night. Same cost for Smite, same mana gain. Smite costs 579 per cast and Atonement gave me like 6.5k mana or something.

[harky]

4.0.3 is not representative of actual Cata changes. It's quite a bit behind still. Virtually none of the updates from beta made it into the patch. It was just a bug-fix patch.

[Kelesti]

4.0.3 is not representative of actual Cata changes. It's quite a bit behind still. Virtually none of the updates from beta made it into the patch. It was just a bug-fix patch.

A bug fix patch that created as many bugs as it fixed.

[harky]

Nah, easily twice as many as they fixed.

[KresnikHellfire]

I typed a lovely, massive wall of text for the official WoW forums that I guess is just as relevant here. It's from a purely PvP standpoint (which is all I've done on beta) but might work to be a discussion point or w/e - just my views on what works / what doesn't for disc PvP on beta:

I know there's a number of topics around about this at the moment but finally being able to try it out myself. I got in a few games of 3v3 and a few games of 2v2 in a number of different comps:

Disc / Rogue
Disc / Moonkin
Disc / Lock / Rogue
Disc / Mage / Rogue
Disc / Mage / Moonkin

And thought I would share my thoughts about what I had seen.

*all of the matches were played in bloodthirsty gladiator's blue gear, which came premade with the character. Some offpieces (such as ones with haste or crit, I'd like to have changed. I reforged most of my off-stats to spirit where possible. I ran with as little mastery as possible. The only PvE pieces I had were Weapon, Offhand, Wand and Trinket 2 (http://db.mmo-champion.com/i/59500/f...-mortality/))*

Self-buffed stats were:
120375 HP
102694 Mana
7857 Spellpower (with inner fire), 7325 Spellpower (with inner will)
3.72% haste
4.27% hit
12.21% crit
9.09 mastery (base mastery is 8 of that)
178 spell pen (undercapped I presume, haven't had time to check)
1623 Combat Regen
2217 Out of Combat Regen
2822 Resiliance

Spec and Glyphs used: http://wowtal.com/#k=smHaukPT.a8t.priest.-0DZEH

Finally, I'd just like to add as a disclaimer that I realise the opponents I was playing against mostly probably weren't the best, mostly between 1600-2k MMR, its just to give some idea of what's happening

Strengths Otherwise known as What didn't seem quite as bad as people were making out

Healing others isn't quite as bad as it seems

While I'll be the first to admit that disc priest coefficients are in dire need of a change (which seems to be coming, according to this blue post: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/1...3277-yeah-baby).

However, in both the 2v2 and 3v3 I tried on beta, it seemed that as long as I abused pillars and my partners used their escape mechanisms I could keep them up around 80% of the time with a simple PWS -> Penance -> Healx2, then PWS back up with the talent "strength of soul".

Of course, when someone would take a beating I'd be more tempted to throw a flash heal or two. I've macroed inner focus into flash heal and greater heal so they're not always bad buttons to press, but having that up really helps.

Against teams with spread pressure (such as affliction warlocks) prayer of mending typically works marvellously, as usual.

Mana burn has the potential to be more powerful than ever

Although the actual opportunities I had to use it were very slim, I did manage to get quite a few off in 2v2 and believe me: it can absolutely destroy a mana pool very quickly. It costs 2882 mana for a priest, and typically would burn about 8k + off an enemy healer. I also found it very useful for taking hybrids out of the game completely (shadowpriest, moonkin, elemental shaman). I faced all of those 3 classes at least once and their mana regen was terrible, meaning that if I burned them it just helped to keep them oom.

Saying that, I did manage to get a resto shaman 100% oom (at the expense of about 70% of my mana pool) only for him to be able to out heal my boomkin's damage because the moonkin was running low as well, which was slightly depressing.

Offensive dispell is still awesome

It costs just under 3k mana with inner fire and just under 2.5k with inner will, which I will admit is a lot, but it's ability to rip through a number of classes - druids in particular, to leave them utterly defenseless is completely worth the mana cost.

Weaknesses Or What is rightfully being moaned about and needs improving

Purge will finish us very quickly

Similar to the way I can completely destroy a resto druid with offensive dispells, we're utterly defenseless against dispells ourselves. In particular I found that mages could rip me apart very easily with a few good spellsteals (I didn't meet any enhancement shamans). For example, we met an MLS whose mage cleaned me of buffs at the very start of the match and then managed to land an insta-spellsteal, in 1 go, on my freshly placed fear ward as his lock was casting fear, and I died in the subsequent feared out into the open -> deathcoiled -> deep freeze. Sure, it was good play on their part, but I timed my fear ward as late as I possibly could and it still went.

Being trained will end the match very quicklyYou need partners who can babysit you or you really will go down like a sack of shit

I realise there's very little change here from what we're all used to, but it really seemed more evident from what I played. In the first match I played (which was RLP, a rubbish setup but I was just trying to get practice) we came up against a TSG that killed me in a throwdown -> strangulate -> charge stun, and I had cast pain sup in the throwdown. If you get trained you have to spam very expensive heals or you'll simply die in 10 seconds, like I did. Except for me it didn't really seem to be "spam expensive heals" more "be controlled having very little control of your character, then die"

Of course, if I'd have had better peels I may have survived, but a fear immune warrior and DK with paladin to dispell them are pretty hard to waddle away from. I understand that this is part of the design goal for Cataclysm (mana war of sorts by making the healer use big heals) but it really just seems to be a Train the healer vs. Train the healer environment and whichever one falls over first is the loser.

It's really not particularly fun to play at all.

Inner Will is a choice I don't ever seem to be able to make

Before I played beta, I really liked the idea of inner will, although suggested buffs for it on these forums. I've got it bound to an easy keybind for me in the hopes that I'd be "stance dancing" quite a lot between the two (they're both 0 mana), but genuinely I never found the time.

We have a great deal of instant casts (PWB, PWS, PoM, Renew, PS, etc. etc.) but most of them require a quick reaction to be used and you can't be spending a global just to have a slightly reduced mana cost on them. The only time I found it useful is if I was going offensive with spam purges. In that respect, it's very nice - but you can only use it when you need to spam purge and you're not being attacked, nor are your team-mates in any immediate danger. Seems like a pretty narrow niche for the ability to be in.

Against melee with snares, I thought it would be "useful" to pop IW and try to get some distance while they were feared, but I never had the time to do anything but heal, pretty much. I was prioritising using heal so I didn't burn my complete mana pool too quickly, then topping off while the fear was ending. But I'd still only find myself with about 70-80% of my health pool by the time he was back from fear. Which was okay, I guess, but in the context of Inner Will it was just another place I could use it.

There is barely any time for offense

In WoTLK I got used to a playstyle of going super-offensive whenever I could to try and get a kill, and that just seems non-existant in Cataclysm. DoT's cost an absolute bomb (4632 for devouring plague), so you can't really pre-dot a target unless you're certain you'll score a kill in the switch. Archangel restores a pitiful amount of mana - like really poor. I don't have it talented at the moment but I seem to remember it restoring a little bit over 5k at 5 stacks when I did have it, which is just over the cost of a devouring plague.

When I duelled a rogue, it was literally just pointless to even try, and it was frustrating to go from a sort of fun way of playing against them to being completely hopeless. With recuperate, there was just no point in sticking dots up, I couldn't really dps him during fears because I needed to heal up, and it ended with me just going oom - although I would note that I made the match last 4+ minutes and managed to get 2 shadowfiends off. The rogue wasn't awesome, but wasn't completely terrible.

It was very evident that I was the healer, with pretty much 0 chance of winning, and I just had to heal myself up until I eventually ran out of mana - which I guess I don't have a problem with, but it's just NOT fun to play like that. I don't expect disc priests will be able to put up much of a fight in duels against any dps class with self heals - which is pretty much all of them these days.

Other things I've noticed

Psychic Scream is a blessing and a curse at the moment.

With the reduction of fear-reducing talents, a psychic scream lasts a full 8 seconds. We've lost the glove bonus but we're able to pick up "Improved psychic scream" if we want (I didn't) and against classes that aren't able to break it - especially melee - it actually seems overpowered. I duelled an assassination rogue and, with a little help from RNG pathing, he spent more than 80% of his time in a fear or running back from a fear.

At the same time, classes who can break fear (mainly warriors) are completely overpowered against us, as it's our ONLY self-peel. The cooldown of berserker rage matching our fear means they can have pretty much 100% up-time on us - and with the damage they can do in a throwdown there's nothing at all we can do.

We're not the only ones with mana problemsHybrid mana is appalling

I noticed it mainly playing with a moonkin, but also against shadowpriests and elemental shamans, they go oom incredibly quickly (especially if their mana cooldowns are negated through dispell / CC) and it leaves them useless in an arena match. I'm not sure if this is how blizzard intend it (presume not) but it seems rather silly.

Biggest essay I've ever written in my life probably, but worth getting off my chest =/

[Suzaku]

There needs to be an entire patch dedicated to PvP balance soon, because things are so imbalanced in PvP right now that it's a complete joke. In Blizzard's infinite wisdom and zeal to nerf healers in PvE, they have completely devastated them in PvP. There is currently one strategy in PvP for any team against another team with a healer, which is to train the healer until he/she runs out of mana and then you win. There is no need to try any other strategy. And I am waiting to see how 3DPS does against 2DPS/Healer teams, if a mage/rogue can easily train a healer, I wonder how fast a healer will go down against warlock/mage/rogue or spriest/mage/rogue.

[harky]

Uh. Good luck with that one. Healers, if anything, are a bit too hard to kill. If you think you can go attrition-style against a team without a healer you're going to fall on your face. Hard. Healers might have trouble going 1 on 1 with DPS at 85, but they can last a long, long time. So ultimately you're banking on being able to drop a healer while you go without heals against 2 DPS. How do you think it's going to turn out most of the time?

Ultimately it's just a return of TBC style PVP. Which is a very good thing. Yes, people can get dropped fast. Yes, healers struggle 1v1... but weak in a group? Absolutely not. I did a lot of messing around as Disc with my guild's other big PVPers in Beta. A lot of that was little 3v3s in Nagrand Disc/Sub/BM against RMP and WLD setups, but we did mess around with Arms/Feral/Enhance a few times. Result? Warrior was a royal pain in the ass. Purge was a royal pain in the ass... and we consistently beat them because they couldn't train me hard enough to kill me without getting roflstomped by our Hunter. So they'd split some attention to her and it gave me enough breathing room to keep going until we could drop the Warrior. Hardest, by far, was trying to go against them as Druid/Pally/Warrior. That was a massive pain in the ass from hell. Mostly my ass, as well. I wound up having to go Holy to deal with it... Either way, I'd fear double healer teams more than triple DPS teams.

[avestren]

I found this on the WoW forums. The poster is saying that it may have slipped MMO's notice.

Priest Changes - Build 13316

Holy
•Heal - Healing increased 20%.
•Flash Heal - Healing increased 20%.
•Binding Heal - Healing increased 20%.
•Greater Heal - Healing increased 20%.

Thoughts?

My first is: Is it fair to ask for a buff to Penance? It's not hitting hard comparatively anymore.